NCDOT has reopened hundreds of roads after Helene, but rebuilding just getting started
More than three months after the remnants of Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina, the rebuilding work by the N.C. Department of Transportation remains in its early stages.
NCDOT has fully reopened 1,250 roads that were closed immediately after the storm on Sept. 27; another 78 roads have partial access to four-wheel-drive vehicles.
But 184 roads remain closed as of Monday, and many of the fixes that have been done are only temporary.
NCDOT has spent more than $252 million repairing roads and bridges as of last week, but that’s only about 5% of the estimated $5 billion it will take to fully rebuild what Helene washed away.
“We’ll be working on this for several years,” said Tim Anderson, the top engineer in NCDOT’s Division 13, a seven-county region that includes some of the hardest-hit areas.
Anderson said NCDOT had restored access to every community in his mountainous territory by Thanksgiving. That included building a gravel roadway along the Rocky Broad River between the communities of Bat Cave and Chimney Rock, where floodwaters washed away numerous homes and businesses and nearly three miles of U.S. 64.
But that road, like so many others throughout the mountains, is not permanent. NCDOT and its contractors have filled washed-out sections of pavement with stone and gravel and replaced missing bridges with temporary ones or culverts that will have to be replaced.
“The work that’s been done so far has really been that emergency work, getting that emergency access back to communities,” said Wanda Payne, the top engineer in Division 14, a 10-county region that includes hard-hit Henderson and Haywood counties. “So now it’s really taking what we put in temporarily and putting in permanent fixes.”
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Helene caused unprecedented damage in Western NC
Much of what’s happening now is invisible to the public: design and engineering work and finding contractors to carry out the construction. In some cases, contractors will be turning temporary roads into permanent ones with asphalt, guardrails and lane markings. But in many cases, they’ll be building from scratch.
“Some of this is way more complex than what we’ve seen in the past, because when you lose the entire roadway and the bench it sat on, you’ve got to replace all of that,” Anderson said. “So that takes engineering, more than just repair.”
NCDOT has never dealt with anything like Hurricane Helene before. It has identified more than 9,200 sites damaged by the storm, ranging from collapsed shoulders and missing guardrails to the disappearance of miles of pavement and the earth underneath it.
The rebuilding of two roads — Interstate 40 through Pigeon River Gorge and U.S. 19W along the Cane River in Yancey County — are each expected to cost about $1 billion. In contrast, NCDOT spent about $700 million on repairs from all previous storms combined since 2016, which includes two hurricanes, Matthew and Florence, that devastated the eastern part of the state.
As they rebuild, NCDOT and its contractors will look for ways to make roads and bridges more resilient to future flooding. That may mean using stone or concrete walls instead of earthen berms to separate sections of road from a river or creek.
The goal is not to build roads that won’t flood in the future, Payne said. It’s to create roads that can withstand a flood better and quickly be reopened when the waters recede.
“Part of that resiliency is making sure what we have will be there after the next storm hits,” she said.
The feverish construction and repair work that followed the storm last fall has subsided with the onset of winter. Snow and ice storms mean NCDOT crews occasionally must set everything aside to brine and plow roads, Anderson said.
“But this is a good time for us to get contracts in place,” he said, “so that when the weather breaks in the spring, we can turn loose a lot more work.”
NCDOT has so far been able to cover the cost of Helene repairs from its cash reserves, which top $2 billion. As of Jan. 2, it had received $48 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The U.S. Department of Transportation pledged $100 million in emergency funding for roads last fall and on Monday announced another $250 million for NCDOT’s rebuilding efforts.
This story was originally published January 13, 2025 at 1:24 PM with the headline "NCDOT has reopened hundreds of roads after Helene, but rebuilding just getting started."
